Getting a non-profit the data to get donations!

This is just the beginning:

I attended Lambda’s full stack web development boot camp which is a 6 month intensive course in coding. In this program we got to cover a wide array of coding languages and styles from front end (Redux, React, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript) to back end (Node.js, PostSQL). In the last month at lambda we got to take part in labs which is where we get to work with a non-profit to build an application for their cause.

In May of 2021 I had an opportunity to work with a non-profit called Family Promise. Family Promise was established in 1986 by Karen Olson and is a fantastic non-profit whose main goal is to help families who have become homeless. It doesn’t stop there either they actually have programs to help families before they find themselves homeless and after they get back on their feet. The do all this by offering services such as rent allowance, bus passes, providing meals, and even offering shelter to those without.

What’s the issue:

Family Promise does fantastic work and I was excited to get started on this project. As a non-profit, Family Promise, gets its funding from donations or grants. In order to keep these coming in it is very important to show results of their work. In order to get the information for Family Promise to continue their noble goal it is imperative for them to show how they are providing for the community. That’s where this project comes in, this application is going to be a service tracker in order to gather information on the recipients of services they provide. Me and my team of other web developers got to work on the humbly named Family Promise Service Tracker application.

Planning:

The team I was grouped with along with our technical product lead would meet twice daily to talk about plans and what we were working on for the day. We would structure our plans out with the use of the trello board so it would be easier for everyone to know what they were working on. When entering into the project we were handed some pre existing code from the former labs cohort to start with. The first couple of days were spent studying the code and seeing the path they were going down. After studying the code it was easy to tell there were some problems with the application. The main problem was that although there were forms rendering to the screen they had no functionality. So with this information we knew it would be important to delegate task because this would require both backend and frontend work to complete. We had a team of 8 full stack web developers so knowing what we had to do we split up for 3 on the back end and 5 on the front. We were optimistic we could straighten out these details with the month we had access to the project.

Getting into it:

When we split the group up from backend and frontend I was on the frontend team. I luckily got to be apart of many of the projects we had with frontend team but my main focus were on the recipients form and the service type table.

When receiving this project it had no way to gather the information for the recipients and as spoken about previously it had no functionality for any of the forms.

To get started the existing code used a styling library called Ant Design which I have never used before so I got to read a lot of documents about that. It actually turned out to be a lot of fun to work with once we got started. Along with Ant D we used several languages, frameworks, and libraries I have experience with such as JavaScript, React, and Redux.

One of the greatest parts of this project was getting to work with people that I hadn’t been able to connect with during the earlier time in Lambda. While working with this project I got to work with nearly everyone on our team! I worked with fellow frontend workers on the Redux and React as well as the styling on our application. I even got to meet with the backend engineers to make sure our data was getting collected in the correct way.

The Results:

After a heavy month filled with coding and learning I am proud to say we did complete a good portion of our goal of adding functionality to the forms in order to collect and display data. With a lot of work on all sides you can now add, edit, and delete on the programs and service type tables.

As you can see in the image above we have a newly entered service type!

Future of the tracker:

Walking into this project we all had the understanding that this was not a one month long project but a project that will get worked on by many generations of Lambda grads in the future. We are all very happy with the work we got to do on this application and excited to see what happens with it in the future.

Going forward the challenge we would want to face straight away is setting up services render to recipients. What we want to do here is have it set up to where you can click on a recipients name and from there you would be provided several options, one being that you can log a service to be attached to the selected recipient. This will be difficult just because of the amount of frontend styling and displaying work to be done in conjunction with the backend tables and request needed.

Lessons Learned:

Taking a step back I can say I am thankful for this time to get to work with such a great non-profit. This project was fun to work on right from the beginning and I got to learn things about myself as a developer I never thought I would. The real stand out for me is that I know how to read code! Now let me explain a little bit here, I can obviously read code because that’s all I have been doing for the last year. When entering into Lambda I had never really seen code so each new language was very foreign and scary. When getting started with this project there were some libraries and languages that I had never seen or been taught and the shocking thing to me was I was not taken aback or scared of them. I simply knew that although I did not know them yet I had the ability to learn them and learn them I did.

The learning did not stop with the code, I got to learn valuable career skills as well. I learned that communication is key in any field, even though me and my team were several hundred (thousand) miles away from one another it was important to talk with each other. I learned it is important to ask questions even if you think they are small or easy, the goal is to get the work done and if that makes it faster do it!